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Welcome to the official Netflix blog. The authors of this blog are various members of the Netflix team, proud to be helping change the way people watch television and delivering on the promise of Internet TV. This blog is a place for us to share some of what we are doing.

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Sunday, August 5, 2007

I go away for the weekend, and all hell breaks loose...

Hey gang. I swear when I left town the Community Tab was just fine. Turns out my team released some new tab designs and one of the elements got messed up, and yes -- somehow on Friday, the Community Tab went back to being a Friends tab for about a day. I'm not changing it back (sorry). I can say that I'm not all that thrilled with the label "Community" and am experimenting with some clearer, more interesting and more descriptive names.

For the next month or so, I'm going to be experimenting a lot on these Community pages. I like your feedback and we all have a lot of ideas to refine these -- to be more fun and more useful. Later this week we'll revise the way those movie reviews appear -- more readable I expect.

Anyway, our team is busy busy pounding on these pages. If we break something in the process, you have our deep apologies. The plan is to make them better. See what you think early next week, I should have a few more gears working by then.

31 comments:

Welcome back, hope you had a nice vacation. The Community tab is there and working. I noticed, similarly to what others have said before, the similarity function on the bottom left of the page doesn't really give me all that similar pages of what I'd expect to see.

Can the choices for flagging reviews be expanded to "Other" where we can type in a reason for those watching for those flags, can read? This way, if the reason for the flag is not of the other choices, it still is useful.

I can't say how much I enjoy the Watch Instantly (Watch Now) feature. You got some good movies and TV show selections there. Are there any plans in having the "Play" tab show up more often? For example, at the Queue page, and every other page that shows a list of movies by actors etc.

A glitch and some thoughts for the Top 10 Lists:-There's a glitch in the program that lets you add titles to your list. At least on my browsers (Mozilla, Safari, or Opera on OS X) it doesn't recognize apostrophes. Some titles are too short before the apostrophe to trigger any titles (e.g., L'Age D'Or). Other titles are just simply too short (e.g., M).-It would be nice to be able to see ratings (your own or "best guess") in top ten lists, both your own lists or others'.-On Members Top 10 Lists that appear on my community home page: At least half of them are always gay-themed. Ok, I'm gay. I do *occassionally* rent gay movies. I guess this makes me stand out, statistically speaking. But the vast majority of my movies are definitely not gay; I would appreciate more variety in the lists picked for me.-Keep up the good work! Thanks for being so open to user feedback. The site looks great!

I no longer can find notes left by me for my friends. 'Notebook' only shows notes left by my friends. It was a convenient way of knowing our conversation for a particular movie. Please re-add this feature.

I think it would be awesome if you offered a personal profile section for members to fill out that you could set as public or private. And it would be even more awesome if you were able to make friend requests to people as you browse their reviews without having to have their email.

"I can't say how much I enjoy the Watch Instantly (Watch Now) feature."

We Mackies neither! Thus the real 'hell breaking loose' is now way down on the 'Watching Instantly' thread. So, Michael, maybe you could suggest to Steve that he let you handle 'Community', which you're doing a terrific job on, and focus more on 'Watch Now' (which, according to the post intro "...tell Steve your hopes and dreams..." is his project), because the natives are getting seriously restless about the dismissive lack of response, or info of ANY kind! By contrast, thanks so much for keeping us updated on Friends/Community, and for your calm and steady stewardship.

@Laura - You can add to your lists directly from the movie's page without typing anything - check out the new blue link in lower left column.

I have to agree with kmc. I'd like to be able to turn off the scrolling of the reviews, or remove them all together. It's quite annoying when I glance over to see if I'm even interested in reading any of the reviews and they keep jumping down while I'm trying to look at them.

It'd be nice to just have a "pause" button for the scrolling reviews. Or even better, just display new ones every time you go to the Community page...I'll just refresh the page if I really want to see more reviews.

@Darkko - I've often thought the same thing but then discovered my review wayyyyyyy in the back, having been booted out of the '3 most recent reviews' area overnight and never seen or voted on. But they'd still show up on your own review page, so if they haven't maybe call customer service and repost this on 'Fixing up Reviews'.

I repeat an earlier request for a slider, if feasible, that we can control all the way from 'off' (because even with the cursor in the 'stream' they still sometimes hop disconcertingly) to 'fast' (if none of the current batch of reviews interests us).

"It'd be nice to just have a "pause" button for the scrolling reviews"

I agree. Sometimes it scrolls to fast for me to get my mouse cursor over there to pause the scrolling. You could still have the mouse-over to stop it, but in addition, a small pause button would be very handy. I like to take a longer look at the reviews before they scroll on, lost for all time.

The taller tabs on Netflix.com look very weird to me by the way. Distended looking, lol. Please revert to the previous way it was.

That's a ditto 'thanks, but no thanks' on the growth-hormone tabs, in case you're just running stuff up the flagplole to see who salutes. But no big deal since we'll never all agree about everything, so whatever the majority wants will be just fine with me - as long as it's the majority and not just the squeakiest wheels!

I don't know if anyone else is having this problem, but the drag-and-drop feature doesn't even show up for me. I've used every browser I can think of - Firefox, Internet Explorer, Netscape, Safari, MSN, even the AOL browser - and no matter which one I use, I still have the same old queue format. I contacted Netflix Customer Service and they told me it simply "hasn't been rolled out to all customers yet," which sounded dubious because I hadn't seen anyone else complain about such a problem. Either way, since the drag-and-drop has apparently been in use for more than a month now, I'd like it activated on my account, please.

Also, there is a problem with my profile. I've written one review, and wrote it recently. Obviously, it took a day or two to show up on my profile, which is fine. But now, it shows up only every now and then. For instance, when it first got put up, my profile read: "1 review, 1 list." Then, I could click on my profile and see the list and the review. The next day, it said "0 reviews, 1 list." Suddenly, the review was gone from my profile (though it remained on the page of the movie I reviewed). The next day it was back. And today it's gone again. It's a pretty asinine problem.

I enjoy the Community tab and don't care so much what its called. And who cares about little glitches on Netflix? Its great.

What I would love to see is a list of other Netflix users that I have a high % in common with. Right now, I pick one of my favorite movies, and look at the reviews to see if I can randomly find someone with 80% or more in common with me, so I can look at their list and find some new rental ideas. Could you do this?

I can see a lot of people are clicking on the similarity feature, and rating reviews directly from my reviews page, as I had a lot of reviews that had been dead for a long time, and now I am seeing new helpful/unhelpful votes appearing. I've been clicking on people similar to me, and have found many interesting movies. Watching closely and excitedly all the new developments.

My reviews are appearing, dissapearing, etc etc, and it's weirding me out...I should, I think, at this point have 31 reviews. Over the past two days, it has been 27, 29, 25 and now, frighteningly, 21. And THEY"RE REALLY GONE! I hope this is a temporary problem...

Sam--actually, they all showed up today, except for one, which I suspect won't show up because i probably used some words that automatically flag a review (it was for Pretty Woman and I used the words 'fascist' and 'whore', so I'm imagining it just won't post), but as of now I consider my review problem over. I never contacted Customer Service.